I don't know how many blogs and YouTube clips I've seen now of people, like me, living with chronic illness and telling the world (or the part of the world that will listen) Just How It Is from their bed. I'm about to join the ranks. Today has been pretty awful and for the first time I'm blogging from my phone lying in the dark with the light from this palmed sized screen lighting up my words. I feel far too sick to lift my head from the pillow and even if I could summon the energy to take a walk around the local neighbourhood I'd only scare my fellow residents looking very much like a wan Halloween ghost with a time-keeping problem.
I don't know if I believe in anything beyond the comfort of these four walls right now. Although I do know I've felt steam-rollered by sickness before and regained enough energy to take tentative steps out in to the world again. I'm hoping for a gentle ascent back in to a less than frantic activity soon.
Before I began writing this I had a vision of a cartoon that I don't think actually exists anywhere outside of my fatigue fuddled head. There's a plane and God is there (the wonders of imagination mean that you can insert any version of God you wish to here) ushering a line of parachutists out in to the gaping sky. One is wearing a parachute with the word 'Life' emblazoned upon it in tall confident letters. Just before the jump God pats the parachutist on the back saying "Watch out, it's quick !". And that's pretty much how I feel, Woody Allen sums it up much more succinctly here.
So here I am in the dark almost bent double by the feather filled tower of pillows I am lying on and, if it weren't for my writing this, I'd be doing nothing. But would I really, my thoughts running like a high speed train, my tireless preoccupation with myself even when I barely have the energy to roll from one side of the bed to the other.
And then -
I breathe and in that tiny pause between in-breath and out-breath I glimpse the light from the hall shining through the transom above the door, hear the slow march of my alarm clock ticking and this thought occurs to me - what if I can just let the nothing be as it is, what if I can see these moments when I am too ill to participate in what life offers as quiet moments of clarity, and the nothing that I flee from as an illuminated bridge between life and death. If I can stop fighting (even for a micro moment) won't I be better prepared for when the infinite finally comes to take me away ?
